


The Education of Children

by chainsaw_poet



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Angst, Canon Era, Friendship, Gen, July Revolution, families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2013-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-05 08:10:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chainsaw_poet/pseuds/chainsaw_poet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Courfeyrac becomes concerned over Marius's mourning of his late father, and attempts to pursue the principle of fraternité alongside the build up to the July Revolution of 1830.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Education of Children

**Author's Note:**

  * For [atheartagentleman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atheartagentleman/gifts).



> This story was written as a holiday gift for atheartagentleman. I hope that whatever winter holiday you're celebrating, it's a lovely one.

_May, 1830_

For the first time that week, Enjolras had not called a an evening meeting. Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly and Prouvaire had found themselves at the Café Musain regardless. Nevertheless, in the spirit of ringing the changes, they elected to take their evening meal in the front room, rather than the back. 

“Mmpf!” Prouvaire exclaimed, pointing out of the window with his mouth still rather full of cassoulet. They had been discussing a new play at the Salle Richelieu, and Prouvaire had a tendency to forget terrestrial things like table manners in the presence of sublime literature. Blushing slightly, and raising his napkin to his mouth as he swallowed, Prouvaire added, “That is your friend on the other side of the street, Courfeyrac. Underneath the street lamp.”

“Which one?” Bossuet said, leaning back over his chair to look out of the window. “Oh, I see – it’s Pontmercy. Will he be joining us again soon?” Bossuet turned to Courfeyrac. “We need all the men we can raise at the moment.”

Courfeyrac gave a loose shrug which suggested that he was the last person who should be asked.

“Rather fetching green coat he’s got on there,” Joly murmured, neglecting his fish pie to study the second hand of his pocket watch, his own fingers pressed to the inside of his left wrist.

“You never once complimented me on it when it was mine,” Courfeyrac said, peering at Marius over the rim of a wine glass. His friend seemed to be studying a map of the city; trying to locate a new publisher to whom he was going to apply for work, no doubt. “I had a deuce of a time trying to get him to take it off me, you know.”

“Pride is an expense those in penury cannot afford,” Bossuet said. He raised his glass to Marius in solidarity, and then to Joly in gratitude. This had the effect of distracting Joly from his pulse, and winning Bossuet a warm smile. “Poor Pontmercy will have to learn to take charity from friends in good grace.”

“Or learn that, as I am forced to tell Lesgle so frequently that I imagine he must be going deaf,” Joly added, adopting a playfully chastising tone. “It is not charity if it comes from your friends.”

“I don’t think it was Marius’s pride as much as the colour,” Courfeyrac said, cutting the fat from his mutton. “Marius does not like to wear anything but black – which has the unfortunate effect of making him look even more virginal than he is.”

“And virgin he shall remain, if he persists in wearing black,” Joly said, laughing and swallowing a mouthful of potatoes. “The only thing less attractive to a grisette than an impoverished law student is an impoverished tutor.”

“You are callous, the lot of you,” Prouvaire cut in. “He is clearly in mourning for someone.”

“His father,” Courfeyrac explained. “I don’t know the half of it really, but from what I do know, Marius never saw the man alive after he was a babe in arms. More than that, Pontmercy _père_ must have been dead more than two years now. To be in mourning still strikes me as somewhat excessive, especially for someone as austere as Marius.”

“Except that he is mourning twice over, Courfeyrac,” Prouvaire said in the urgent whisper that used for the most serious of topics. “Once for losing his father to Death, and once more for having lost him while he was alive. The one is natural if distressing; the other – in this instance – seems not to be natural at all, and all the more distressing for it. Marius honours his father’s memory, and sorrows over the memories of his father which have been kept from him.”

The conversation had swung - as it often did amongst young men in possession of some wit, some more ideas, and a surplus of leisure - from the facile to the serious. It would oscillate again in time. It was not that Courfeyrac did not like serious conversation; in fact, he took conversation itself seriously and considered himself rather a good practitioner of the art. But Courfeyrac did not like melancholy conversation – and this conversation was threatening to turn melancholy, or at the very least Gothic. Courfeyrac was also impatient, and thus unwilling to wait for the tide of interlocution to turn.

“I cannot see,” he began, in a tone which suggested that the speaker had a great deal of confidence in his opinion, but perhaps a great deal less evidence with which to support it. “How it can be more painful to lose something which one never had, that something of which one was in possession. If a single louis is picked from my pocket, I would feel that more keenly than some unscrupulous relative cheating me of an inheritance of thousands of which I was entirely unaware.”

“Speaking as the only man present who has lost his father,” Bossuet said, in a tone of unusual gravity. “I can vouchsafe that it is an absence that cannot be measure in louis, even in their thousands.”

Before Bossuet had even finished speaking, Courfeyrac realized quite what he had said. Face crumbling into an expression of shame, he exhaled heavily.

“My dear Lesgle, you must accept my apologies. I am an idiot, I didn’t think…”

Bossuet smiled broadly and clapped a hand on Courfeyrac’s shoulder, gestures conveying more effectively than words that he was not going to take offense or be upset by the mistake.

“Quite all right,” he said. “Besides, my own unhappy experience moves us no closer to understanding Marius’s predicament. I knew my father very well – to my great benefit, as he was a fine man.” 

Bossuet raised his glass in a toast and the other three followed suit, Courfeyrac looking particularly solemn. 

“Although, I can see how it might be harder in Marius’s case,” Bossuet continued. “Part of the consolation in such times comes from thinking of the departed: both about what he or she did, and what he or she might have done, or said, or thought were they here now. This is painful at first, of course, when one practically expects them to walk into a room and begin a conversation with you. But in time, it becomes soothing – joyous, almost. And if Marius never knew his father, then he will not have that comfort.”

“But it is an impossible problem,” Joly said, focusing intently on the glass he had just placed down, which was twinkling in the candlelight. “For one either knows one’s father or does not, and so cannot have both experiences and compare between the two.”

“But we can imagine, as Bossuet has done.” Prouvaire’s eyes drifted back to the window, and to Marius in the lamplight. “I expect that Marius spends a lot of time imagining as well; recreating in daydreams the memories that were denied him. He has a severe look about him, do you not think, Courfeyrac?”

Courfeyrac had thought it, although he remembered now that his advice to Marius had been to spend less time looking at books and more time looking at girls – advice which, in light of what Prouvaire had said, was perhaps not particularly helpful. Courfeyrac had not thought that the pallor which provided the base coat for Marius’s olive complexion, or his melancholy distraction had any source greater than poverty and a tiresome job. Either of which alone would have been enough to put Courfeyrac himself in a dreadful mood.

“Does he speak to you about it much?” Prouvaire pressed again.

“About his father? No. Almost never, in fact. There is a friend of his father’s whom he visits occasionally, a church warden…” Courfeyrac paused, and pushed a piece of boiled carrot across his plate; his knife scraped a protest against the porcelain. “But that’s all I know.”

“Perhaps he talks to his other friends,” Bossuet said, generously.

“Yes, perhaps.” Courfeyrac could not remember a single instance in which Marius had referred to another friend. Aside from the elderly curate, the only other person Marius spoke of was his landlady. Courfeyrac coloured and looked back out of the window.

“I assume none of you would if I invited Marius to…” 

But just as Courfeyrac had pushed his chair back to stand, the door to the café swung open with a violence that sent it slamming into the door on its other side. In its wake came Bahorel and Enjolras, the latter hatless and both out of breath. 

“What have you four been doing all this time?” Enjolras gasped, resting on a chair to catch his breath, tossing back curls which had spilled into his eyes.

Bossuet raised an eyebrow louchely and gestured towards the table. 

“Improving a decidedly average dinner with good company,” he said. “And missing some excitement it seems?”

“Something important has happened?” Courfeyrac asked, rising to his feet. Important events seemed to be happening with increasing – and exhilarating – frequency these days. 

Bahorel gave a breathless laugh.

“The Polytechnicians have set one of their buildings on fire,” he said, quickly. “Combeferre and Feuilly are on their way there now. Care for an excursion?”

“On fire?” Joly said, sounding a little more excited about the destruction of property than might have been deemed proper for a medical student. 

“It is not a very large fire,” Enjolras said with palpable regret, before adding hastily and with some force, “But a determined act of rebellion nonetheless. This may be the spark we’ve been waiting for. So, will you come?”

The words were almost unnecessary; the four were already draining glasses and emptying out pockets to throw coins on the table to approximately the value of the half-finished meal and wine. At a small smile from Enjolras, they all bundled towards the door, Joly and Bossuet sharing excited glances, and Prouvaire slinging an arm around Bahorel which meant he was practically carried over the threshold on Bahorel’s shoulder. Only Courfeyrac’s eye was momentarily diverted from the forward motion, back to the streetlight opposite the café.

The space beneath it was empty. Marius had disappeared into the night.

 

Upon their arrival at the gates of the _Ecole Polytechnique_ , it quickly emerged – to Enjolras’s great disappointment – that the fire (which was indeed, on the small side) had not been a deliberate act of revolution. A spark from a pipe which had not been properly extinguished had got into some bed linen and set a barrack ablaze, Feuilly explained as the six friends arrived out of breath.

“Apparently, we will have a little longer to wait before the streets of Paris really heat up,” Combeferre added, wryly.

“If overthrowing the current state of affairs also involves you and Enjolras becoming punsters, I might have to rethink my affiliations with the cause,” Courfeyrac said, straining to see the fire through the amassed Polytechnicians and spectators. “In some things, the status quo really ought to remain.”

Nevertheless, it was not an entirely wasted excursion. The barracks had been evacuated and the staff of the institute, rather preoccupied with making sure that their buildings were being appropriately tended too, paid less attention to the behaviour of their students. As such, there were plenty of opportunities for conversations between _Les Amis_ and the uniformed young men who were usually closeted away from cafes and dancehalls. Names and information were exchanged, mutual acquaintances discovered and discussed.

As such, despite the causes of the fire being domestic rather than political, Enjolras came away from the blaze with a spark in his own eyes, which transformed into a proper smile when Courfeyrac slung an arm around his shoulders.

“Satisfied with today’s activities, then?”

“More than satisfied,” Enjolras confirmed with a quiet nod. “It may not have been quite what we expected, but perhaps the words of the Polytechnicians were, unusually, worth more than deeds. They are keen. They will join us when the time comes.” Enjolras bit down on his lower lip, cheeks glowing. “I only wish that time would stop dragging its feet and arrive.”

“Patience.” Combeferre appeared on Enjolras’s other side. “We cannot force it, or we risk losing the momentum that is building as we speak. The time will be upon us soon enough.”

Enjolras hesitated, and then nodded gravely, before turning back to Courfeyrac.

“But I must apologise for interrupting your dinner, especially as it was only for accidental arson.”

“My dear fellow, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” Courfeyrac’s eyes twinkled. “Although you might make it up to me by treating me to dessert?”

They did, of course, end up back where they had started, although in the back room of the Musain this time. Naturally, such good fortune – combined with the feeling that things were finally coming to a head, as they had been threatening to do since March – had to be celebrated with several bottles of wine.

“For it is not our role to pour water on such flames,” Grantaire had drawled. He had been waiting for them in the back room with three bottles to begin with, having somehow heard about the fire despite not having been present at the Polytechnique itself. “Your opponents can do that very well themselves.”

The highlight of the evening, however, was Enjolras producing a whole tarte tatin, to rapturous applause from the assembled group. Giving a smart bow as he placed it on a table more used to bearing armaments, Enjolras caught Courfeyrac’s eye and smiled, before refusing to answer any of Combeferre’s questions about where Enjolras had procured such a thing from at that time of night. 

All of this merriment, however, meant that Courfeyrac’s thoughts did not drift back to Marius until much later in the evening. Almost at its end, in fact, when he had ended up a bench next to Bossuet, who had Joly’s head in his lap.

“He doesn’t have other friends,” Courfeyrac mumbled, still with just enough sobriety to worry about keeping his voice beneath the hum of the room. 

“Who doesn’t have other friends?” Bossuet asked, placing a brotherly arm around Courfeyrac’s shoulders.

Courfeyrac could not blame Bossuet; that conversation had been some time, and even more wine, ago.

“Pontmercy. Marius.” Courfeyrac sighed and leant a little more heavily against Bossuet. “You said before that perhaps he spoke to his other friends. About his father. Well, he doesn’t have any. Any other friends.”

“Ah.” Bossuet was a rather good drinker – hence why his orgies were such spectacular events to witness. Far better than Joly, who looked as though he might be trying to sleep in Bossuet’s lap, and was in any case, paying no attention to the conversation. Bossuet’s pause, then, was not of intoxicated absent-mindedness, but thought. “Well – that isn’t your fault, Courfeyrac. Nor is it your fault that he has not spoken to you.”

“I might have tried harder with him.” Courfeyrac picked at a loose thread on the cuff of his shirt, until Bossuet stopped him by placing his hand over Courfeyrac’s own.

“We have been rather preoccupied with other things,” Bossuet said, gesturing around the room to the various maps, pamphlets, and lists of equipment that littered the walls of the room. Then, he added, “And I’m not sure there’s much you could have done. Now, it may have slipped your memory, but I once owned a field, and – in the days where I fancied myself an agrarian rather than a republican – I hired a horse to plough it. I learnt, as all men do, that you can lead the animal to water, but not make it drink.”

Courfeyrac gave a weak smile to the story, but it did not linger long on his lips.

“I’m not sure I’ve done the first bit for Marius,” he confessed. 

“Well, then, you have something to try,” Bossuet replied. “Although, if you will accept some advice, a good dinner tends to work better than a trough when one is dealing with men, rather than horses.”

Courfeyrac smiled properly this time.

“I’ll remember that.”

“And in return for my sagacious wisdom, do you think you might help me get this one home?” Bossuet inclined his head towards Joly who was now, quite definitely, snoring softly. “He’s heavier than he looks. Joly… Jolllly… Time to go home…”

 

Marius’s first reaction upon returning home to find Courfeyrac in his rooms, seated at his desk, and flicking idly through his English dictionary, was to start audibly and drop the portfolio of papers he was carrying. 

Courfeyrac’s reaction to Marius’s reaction was to laugh loudly.

Marius scowled. 

“You might give a man a heart attack, waiting in his rooms like that,” he muttered, bending awkwardly to pick up the papers.

Courfeyrac closed the dictionary with a flourish.

“Only you, Marius,” he said, warmly. “Besides, it’s my health you ought to be worried about. I’ve been waiting here for an hour, and this room is exceedingly damp and has no fire!”

“Yes, I’m aware of that.” 

Marius stood up straight, righting his hat which had slipped forward over his eyes, and looked at Courfeyrac as though he might issue a challenge. Then a blush came to his cheeks and he dropped his eyes again, still frowning. Tossed the paper onto his bed, Marius sat down next to it, there not being another chair in the room. The rickety iron frame creaking with the addition of his weight. Courfeyrac winced at the noise, but Marius just sighed. 

“Did you want something from me, Courfeyrac?” he asked, removing his hat. Marius had thick dark hair to match his deep dark eyes which fell, naturally it would seem, if not quite into fashionable curls then into very fetching waves. Marius then proceeded to hide these waves between his old hat and the collar of Courfeyrac’s old coat. Courfeyrac could have sighed himself at the sheer waste of it.

“I did, indeed,” he replied, flashing a smile. “I wanted you, in fact – your company, if you’d rather – for dinner this evening.”

“Oh.” Marius’s mouth formed a small circle as though this was the most surprising invitation in the world, and then he blushed furiously. “Oh, Courfeyrac, I’m sorry, but I’ve already eaten.”

“What?” Courfeyrac pulled out his pocket watch in disbelief. “Marius, it is only a quarter to seven. How can you have dined already?”

Marius blinked, looking rather like a fawn that was having an unexpected encounter with a farmyard cart. 

“I sat down and ate it,” he said simply.

“Oh yes, very funny… Where on earth served you a dinner at before six in the evening?”

“Rousseau’s.”

Courfeyrac’s look of pity was only half hammed up for the occasion.

“My dear Marius, that is not dining,” he said, pressing a hand to his heart. “It may be eating, but it is not dining. Nevertheless, it’s good, because it means you will have room for a second dinner.” Truth be told, Marius looked as though he could do with a few extra dinners. Even within the strictures of the current fashions, he was a little on the thin side. Fashionably malnourished and actually malnourished were quite different things. “My treat, naturally.”

“Courfeyrac, I really couldn’t…” Marius began.

“Nonsense. I say treat, but, of course, you would really be doing me a favour. If you don’t join me, you’ll be condemning me to dine alone this evening. Besides, I know I never properly repaid you for letting me borrow those notes of yours from our Roman Law lectures.”

Marius frowned at this and looked rather seriously at Courfeyrac.

“Come, Courfeyrac, you know that you did.” Unconsciously, Marius pulled at the sleeve of his green coat. 

“A birthday present, then. I didn’t get you a birthday present.”

Marius gave a surprised laugh.

“Do you even know when my birthday is?”

“I confess I do not, which explains my inexcusable lack of a present.” Courfeyrac gave a smile, which Marius could not help but return. “Please, Marius. It is a dinner, not a debt.”

Marius peered hard at Courfeyrac for a rather awkward few moments, and then replaced his hat.

“Apparently, I am to be given no choice in the matter,” he said. 

“You are the only man I know,” Courfeyrac began, standing up and replacing his own hat. “Who accepts a dinner invitation as though it were a warrant for his execution. You have been out of society for too long, Marius.” Having replaced his overcoat, Courfeyrac pulled Marius to his feet, and slipped his arm through his friends. “Clearly, my invitation comes not a second too late.”

 

Courfeyrac waited until after the soup course to broach the subject on which he had been waiting all night to question Marius. 

“You don’t talk about your family much,” Courfeyrac said lightly, refilling Marius’s glass.

“Because I don’t have one,” Marius replied, as though this should have been obvious.

“But you did. You must have done, at some point.”

“I am an only child. My mother died when I was an infant; and my grandfather took me from my father.” Marius paused to chop a carrot with a little more violence than might have been strictly necessary. “I have a cousin in the army, I suppose.”

“Oh, and what’s he like?” Courfeyrac asked, thinking that this was at least a place to start.

The knife slashed through the carrot for a second time, even more forcefully.

“An idiot,” Marius said. 

From one usually so mild, this was quite an unexpected reaction. Courfeyrac wondered if the horse wasn’t already at the bank and about to give Courfeyrac a good kicking for his pains. Still, Courfeyrac was not one to give up without a fight.

“Your father, though,” he tried again, pausing to refill Marius’s wine glass. “Were you told much about him?”

“Are you asking me this for a reason, Courfeyrac?”

The question came so suddenly – and from Marius, who was usually so far from interrogative – that Courfeyrac’s arm slipped, sending a seam of red wine across the table. He righted the bottle swiftly, and looked up with a smile.

“Do I need a reason?” he asked, opening his arms.

“No.” Marius coloured slightly and looked down at his meal. “But you’ve never asked me before.”

“Then I have been awfully remiss,” Courfeyrac replied. But Marius neither responded or raised his eyes. Courfeyrac tried again. “I assure you – there is nothing sinister in my motives. I simply like to know my friends.”

“I…” Marius began, and then faltered again. “I don’t know very much.”

“Marius,” Courfeyrac smiled again, thinking back to Marius’s gallows-look at the invitation to dinner. “This is a conversation, not an examination…”

“I know,” Marius said quickly, and then swallowed hard, reaching an unsteady hand for his glass. He took a hasty gulp of wine, spluttered a little, and then finally managed to look up at Courfeyrac. “I… That is, would you mind if we spoke about something else?”

He looked so very young in the evening twilight, and rather romantic with it. The light might have highlighted the places in which the fabric of his green jacket was worn to a soft, unintentional sheen, but it also glanced off his elegant cheekbones, and cast his eyes dark and dreaming hollows. Prouvaire would have fashioned him into the protagonist of a closet drama. If it was always difficult for Courfeyrac to deny his friends anything, it was impossible to do so for Marius – all melancholy glances and trembling frowns, damn him.

“Of course not, forgive me,” Courfeyrac said quickly, his hand reaching over the table but halting before it reached Marius’s forearm. “Did you hear, Bossuet has been cut from Blondeau’s class for a third time?”

In a single exhale, the tension flooded from Marius’s shoulders and his eyes focused on the room once more, rather than some impossibly distant location, far away in the middle distance.

“And without my assistance this time,” Marius replied, reaching for his wine. 

“You are gaining some wit at last.” Courfeyrac raised his own in response. “Bahorel is thrilled, of course. Joly outwardly despairs, but gives Bossuet fond and indulgent glances when he thinks no one is looking. And Enjolras is pleased, because the law school no longer distracts L’Aigle at a time when we most need men… Not that it ever did much, of course…”

“Why especially do you need men?” Marius asked sharply.

Courfeyrac stared at his friend with no little disbelief. For one with such a keen ear for conversation, Marius could apparently, also be extraordinarily hazy on matters of current affairs.

“The King’s position, Marius – surely you’ve been reading the newspapers? Or walking the streets? People have spoken of nothing else since the dissolution of parliament in March.”

Marius bit his lip anxiously.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people,” he said. “I do read the papers, though – and I did read about that. Is something going to happen, then?”

Courfeyrac could no longer resist rolling his eyes.

“You really have been out of society for too long,” he said. “More specifically, our little society for teaching school children. We’ve been working hard on conning our lessons recently, so that we might be well armed for the forthcoming examinations. We want to see if we might dislodge those at the top of the class.”

Marius’s expression as he worked out quite what Courfeyrac was saying was, Courfeyrac decided, worth every sou he spent on dinner. 

 

The next time Courfeyrac bumped into Marius, however, was not in a place and time particularly conducive to conversation. This was partly because Courfeyrac quite literally bumped into Marius, nearly bowling him over as Marius stepped out of a mail coach with had just returned to Paris. 

Courfeyrac himself was dashing between two cafés, as he seemed to have spent most of the month of June doing. Carrying and seeking intelligence of political activity was now his primary, almost only, concern. He imagined that, like Bossuet, he had now been struck off the register in all of his classes. Though having not been near the law school in some weeks, he had no way of confirming this, but nor did it occupy much of his thoughts. None of the _Amis_ were attending classes any more, although Combeferre’s eyes often strayed to a clock at the hours of his lecture, and Joly lamented having not had his hands on a cadaver in weeks. But as Enjolras was fond of telling them, and as they all knew in their hearts, a moment like this would not come again soon.

Nevertheless, the political situation could allow five minutes for a less abstract act of _fraternité_. Especially when presented with the sight of Marius’s best hat and coat, which always piqued no little curiosity in Courfeyrac. 

“You have been travelling, I see,” Courfeyrac said, taking Marius by the shoulder and leading him, his new coat, and his small suitcase out of the worst of the throng on the street.

“Just a small trip,” Marius confirmed, apparently somewhat nervous about having been caught returning to Paris covered in the dust of the road.

“A holiday? Rather wise. Many people are choosing to escape the city, for it looks to be a hot July. But then it is a heat in which some of us rather like to bask.”

“Not a holiday precisely.” Marius looked up and the rays of the afternoon sunlight caught his face beneath the narrow brim of his hat. The hard, bright sunlight made visible dappled marks on Marius’s cheeks, spots at which the dirt of travel had been inadvertently washed clean, ghostly traces of tears already wept. 

“My dear fellow,” Courfeyrac began, drawing Marius closer still. “Has something happened? Are you unwell?”

Marius shook his head, biting down on his lip. 

“It is nothing,” he managed to mutter.

“That clearly isn’t true.” Courfeyrac risked placing a hand underneath Marius’s chin, titling his head upwards so that Courfeyrac could look into his eyes, deep with some repressed sentiment that Courfeyrac could not – that is, was not allowed to understand. “You must tell me where you have been that has upset you so.”

“Sometimes I visit my father’s old comrades. Many of them reside in Paris but this gentleman, a general…” Marius broke off as though the rest was too difficult to say.

Courfeyrac sighed, and quickly considered how long he might reasonably expect the man he was supposed to meet in the Café Lemblin to wait for him.

“Let me take you home,” Courfeyrac offered generously. “You’re tired from travelling. A glass of wine and you will feel…” But Marius was shaking his head again.

“No, thank you, I can see that you have somewhere to be and…” Marius swallowed a large breath, as though he was coming up from a long dive. “I’d quite like to be alone, if you don’t mind.”

“As you wish, of course,” Courfeyrac said, reluctantly removing his hand from Marius’s shoulder. “Please do call on me soon, though,” he added, as Marius disappeared into the throng, giving only a sharp nod to Courfeyrac’s request.

Even if Courfeyrac had been the sort to dwell on things, the press of the crowd and the more forceful press of time would not have let him do so. Courfeyrac’s only option was to move onward, with only a fleeting glance over his shoulder to Marius, retreating into the past.

 

The note read only _A.B.C._ , but Courfeyrac, of course, had known what that meant and had wasted no time in responding to Enjolras’s message. Indeed, in his haste to get from the Latin Quarter to the Tuileries, where it had been decided last night that _Les Amis_ should concentrate their attentions, Courfeyrac left behind his hat. Nevermind – there was another in his rooms, and it was only a very slight diversion to stop by and retrieve it. 

Courfeyrac had not been to his rooms in some days. Discussions had stretched late into the night, and it had been easier to simply sleep wherever the friends had ended up on a given evening: Joly’s rooms last night, Bahorel’s the night before, once even the floor of the Musain for itself. He was, at this moment, dressed in a shirt of Combeferre’s. A small pile of notes were outside of his door. One was from his landlord – a demand for payment, no doubt – and another was a letter in his father’s handwriting. Not wishing to deal with either at present, Courfeyrac turned instead to the final object. It was a carte de visite, of good stock and neatly printed with the name ‘Le Baron Marius Pontmercy’. 

One could always rely on Marius for a smile, even in the most serious of times. Courfeyrac turned the card over.

 _’Courfeyrac’_ , the note read. _’You were absent when I called. I will try again in a few days. M. Pontmercy.’ _Then, a final line, added as an afterthought: _’I called on Sunday.’___

Courfeyrac tossed the letters at his desk as he entered his rooms, glancing around briskly for his other hat which seemed to have been buried amongst the books, clothes, and fragments of weaponry that littered every surface in the small room. Most reached the surface of the table, but the one from his father fell short, landing loudly on the floorboards and drawing Courfeyrac’s attention back to it. It had landed face up, Courfeyrac’s name and address blazoned in a familiar hand. Courfeyrac knew exactly the sort of thing it would contain. Reprimands for Courfeyrac being lazy about writing to his mother and sisters. Somewhat more forceful reprimands for spending too much money. A pointed enquiry as to whether or not he intended to be finished with studying the law any time soon, and whether he was considering a visit to the South over the summer. His father’s letters were always of a type. 

Telling himself that he certainly did not have time to read the letter now, Courfeyrac spotted his hat and was about to exit his rooms, when something stopped him. The presence of the letter on the floor – combined with the realisation that now, finally, he was going to do something brave, or foolhardy, or both – seemed to root Courfeyrac to the spot. He was about to go and stand on a barricade, and in all probability be shot at, and perhaps even be actually shot. And more than that, his father had no idea of all of this. His father, who had written this letter probably two weeks ago in the silence of his study with a view of the Rhone in the distance, thinking of his son drinking and dancing and not studying enough, if he imagined Courfeyrac’s life in any detail at all.

Cursing the sudden attack of sentiment which seemed to have overcome him, Courfeyrac made his way back to his desk and hastily took up pen and paper, scribbling the date: Tuesday, July 27. 

_My dear Father…_

He kept the message brief. There was an apology for having stupidly managed to end up dead at the age of twenty-three, and for putting his family to the trouble and upset of a funeral. _I can promise you,_ Courfeyrac wrote, indulging himself in gallows humour, _that I did everything I could to avoid it and I thought of you all at the end._ Perhaps that would turn out to be a lie. Courfeyrac had no real idea what men thought of when they died. But it read well enough.

The real problem with how to end the letter. Having written, _Your loving son_ , Courfeyrac was torn on the question of what name to place afterwards. To sign it _G. Courfeyrac_ , was to deny his father’s name in the last words shared between them, but to sign it _de Courfeyrac_ would be for Courfeyrac to deny his own self. It was one of those logic problems of which Joly and Combeferre were so fond: how was it possible for two distinct people to exist in one man? 

He decided to let the letter go unsigned.

Courfeyrac blotted the note with such haste that the ink smudged a little. He folded it, and placed in within an envelope, on which he wrote the brief instruction that the contents should be forwarded to Monsieur F. de Courfeyrac in the event of Courfeyrac’s death. 

Then, with the ink still drying and his father’s letter still on the floor, Courfeyrac dashed back to the street, letting the door slam behind him.

It was in the sickly, suffocating heat of early August that Courfeyrac finally returned to his rooms.

He was angry, of course. Courfeyrac knew himself well enough to determine that his was currently not good sort of anger. It was a bitter angry. It was the kind of feeling that sits in the pit of the stomach, and twists and stabs as though it is feeding on your insides, and you wonder how you came to swallow something so poisonous. It was the sort of anger that had to be killed off and starved out before the white hot anger, the anger which made one act rather than fester, could return. That anger, the good anger, would come again in time.

Most of all, however, Courfeyrac was simply exhausted. He wanted a glass of wine, a change of clothes, some hot water, and a warm meal. But most of all, he wanted his bed. 

Upon entering his rooms, Courfeyrac’s eyes fell on the letter from his father which remained where it had landed several days before, altered only by the presence of a thin layer of dust. From there, Courfeyrac glanced over to the other letter – the one in his own hand – which still lay on the desk, destined never to be read. Merely days later, the act of writing that letter appeared melodramatic and rather stupid. There had been bullets, of course, and no little fighting. But now, away from the barricade, the actual prospect of dying seemed so distant as to have been nothing more than a vague nightmare from which one awoke only half-remembering what had been so frightening in the first place.

Without thinking about it, Courfeyrac tore his letter into scraps, tearing and tearing until the contents were entirely unreadable and fragments of that other future lay littered over his desk and chair. 

His father’s letter was still on the floor, clinging to the edge of a threadbare rug. Courfeyrac felt absolutely no urge to read it now. It would merely be a confirmation of everything that he had learnt over the past few days; that he was nothing more than a student like so many others, at the mercy of his father’s purse strings and chastised for the same misdemeanours as every other fellow in his lectures. He had stood on a barricade and held a gun, but he would be sent back to classes the following term, under a regime so similar to the last in everything but semantics, that the past seven days might not have happened at all.

A small voice in Courfeyrac’s head that sounded suspiciously like Combeferre told him, quiet sensibly, that none of this was really true. After a good night’s rest in his own bed, he would see that change had come – not enough change, to be sure, but change nonetheless. More than this, if Courfeyrac has shown anything about himself it was that he was anything but a loafing student. He had sheltered from bullets under paving slabs, bandaged bayonet wounds, and held midnight conferences over little bread and less wine. And the time would come for him, and the others to do it all again.

Sleep, however, needed to come first.

The knock at the door came just as Courfeyrac had nestled his head, almost feverish with disappointment and strain, against the cool cotton of his pillowcase. Childishly, he thumped the bedclothes with one hand. It was probably his landlord, planning to take advantage of Courfeyrac’s weakened state to press about the rent. 

“Please, go away!” he cried, burrowing deeper into the pillows.

“Oh. Er… all right,” came a familiar voice from the other side of the door. 

“Marius?”

Fuelled by surprise more than anything else, Courfeyrac dragged himself up from his bed, and opened his door. Standing a few steps back from the threshold, as though he really had been in the process of leaving, was Marius, dressed in his old coat and hat once more.

“I said that I would call again next week,” Marius offered, hesitantly. 

Leaning heavily against the door frame, Courfeyrac remembered the carte de visite.

“Of course, you did,” he said, with a sigh.

“I can go. If you want me to.”

Courfeyrac shook his head, and opened the door, gesturing that Marius should enter. 

“You’re here now – you might as well come in. I warn you, though, I’ll be terrible company.”

"I would have come sooner… Er…” Marius babbled, a look of slight alarm crossing his face as Courfeyrac returned to the small bedroom set off from the sitting room. Courfeyrac waved wearily for Marius to follow him before collapsing back onto the bed. “But it’s been awful outside the past few days. My landlady advised me not to leave the house. Was that your… er.. examination?” Marius asked tentatively. 

There was no chair in Courfeyrac’s bedroom, so Marius, clearly unsure of the propriety of sitting on the bed itself, lingered awkwardly at its foot, hat still in his hand.

“It was indeed,” Courfeyrac replied, burying his grimace in the pillow. “Not quite the result we desired. Definitely a ‘could do better’.”

“But you said that you wanted to change the head of the class,” Marius said, looking rather pleased with himself for having remembered Courfeyrac’s conceit. “And you have done so, have you not?”

“Rather, the point was to reapportion merits and demerits, so that all would be equals,” he said, looking rather seriously at Marius. “And in that we failed quite spectacularly.”

“Oh.” Marius dropped his head and worried at his lip. “Oh..."

There was, however, something in Marius’s bewildered innocence that quelled the harsh bile of cynicism that was rising in Courfeyrac’s throat. In the same way that it was quite difficult to be angry at Marius, it was also quite difficult to be truly angry at anything when Marius was around.

“Was there a reason why you called on me?” Courfeyrac asked, desperate to change the subject.

“Oh, er, yes.” Marius looked rather startled to be asked this, as though Courfeyrac had been calling on him rather than the other way around. “I wanted to apologise.”

“Whatever for?” Courfeyrac asked, now a little startled himself.

“For being so awfully rude to you in the street the other day. Well, a few weeks ago now, I suppose,” Marius corrected himself. “When you bumped into me, and then I dashed off without a word?”

“I didn’t think you were rude,” Courfeyrac said softly, patting on the bed to indicate that Marius should sit, which he did, if stiffly. “Only upset.”

“I was rather.” Marius was looking at the dusty tips of his boots rather than at Courfeyrac. 

Now seemed to be both the best and worst possible moment to press Marius on the subject, and so, naturally, Courfeyrac proceeded to do so.

“Was it about your father?”

Marius met Courfeyrac’s gaze once more. He had a tight set to his shoulders and his cheeks were flushed. He nodded sharply.

“I go to hear them talk about him, these old generals with whom he served. There’s no other reason for me to seek their company. In all other respects but their politics, they might be my grandfather. Relics of another time. But I like to hear them talk. Or at least, I like it whilst they are talking. It’s only after I leave them that I realise that I have said nothing in return, because I have nothing to say. On the subject of my father, I have nothing to contribute; I can only listen.” Marius paused and swallowed hard. “There is something unspeakably wrong in that.”

Courfeyrac could only agree.

“I’m very sorry that you weren’t allowed to know him,” he said simply.

Marius held the apology for a moment in silence.

“I think you might be the first person ever to have said that,” he said, finally.

Courfeyrac smiled sympathetically, and pulled at Marius’s arm to suggest that he might move a little further onto the bed. Unfortunately, Marius had not been expecting this, and the result was that Marius tumbled over onto his side and half on top of Courfeyrac. He spluttered apologies, but Courfeyrac only laughed, and wrapped an arm over Marius so that he could not wriggle away.

“We are a pair,” Courfeyrac declared. “You cannot speak of your father, and I cannot speak to my father – or write to him at least. I left a letter behind here addressed to him, in case I should die on the barricades. It was a rotten thing, full of jokes and untrue platitudes. I couldn’t even sign it because – and this is ridiculous – because it suddenly struck me that I don’t even share his name any more. Not properly. He will cling to that particle to the end of his life, and probably into the next, if it exists.”

“I’m sure he would have appreciated it, none the less,” Marius replied.

Courfeyrac tilted his head in thought, so that it was lying against Marius’s own. The heat of another body next to him – one which was not covered in sweat, blood and gunpowder residue – was more comforting than the bed alone, and Courfeyrac was suddenly very glad that Marius had called on him.

“Do you think it’s a new thing for our times?” Courfeyrac asked, suddenly. “For fathers and sons to be kept so distant from one another by politics?”

“I am about as far from being an expert on the subject of fathers as it is possible to be,” Marius said with a sigh. 

“Perhaps you are simply an archetypal case,” Courfeyrac continued. “In that none of us really know our fathers, and they in turn, do not know their children. You, at least, lack the pretence.”

“I think I might have liked that pretence, though,” Marius said, a small tremble in his voice.

Courfeyrac drew him closer still, and in a moment of utter impulsiveness, kissed Marius on the cheek.

“I know,” he said softly. 

Marius looked up at him, his big dark eyes filled with longing for something, although he, and perhaps none of them, would ever truly know what that was, let alone be able to grasp it. 

“I’m sorry about your revolution, Courfeyrac,” Marius said, breaking the silence at last.

Courfeyrac gave a wry laugh.

“Not as sorry as I am.” He sighed again, and threw his head backwards. “ _Par dieu_ , it’s done. There’s not much more to say. They’ll be other fights.” He turned to Marius once more. “Perhaps you’ll even be present for those one.”

Marius gave a soft, faraway smile.

“Perhaps,” he said.


End file.
